Repent. The end is near.

You want that sweet Ivy League vibe to reverberate through your essays but don’t have the chops to write them that way? Let Unemployed Professor write all of those tedious essays, take-home exams, and anything else that one of your dreadful professors throws at you. With low rates, unparalleled customer service, and insane expertise, you can buy research papers and college term papers from your own Unemployed Professor.

Unlike most of our competitors, all of our writers hold advanced graduate degrees from respected universities. If they don’t, we simply don’t hire them. So what are you getting when you hire us to do your work? The person who will be writing for you will have approximately the same qualifications as the person who designed the assignment! What does that mean? Our people know the proverbial tricks of the trade whereby your professors trap you, make you lose points on ridiculous technicalities, and thereby prevent you from partying (or living quietly) as you would so desire.

I suppose this is what they mean when they talk about chickens coming home to roost. I suppose that universities sort of had this coming, what with the rampant overproduction of PhD’s.

Maybe this has been around a long time — Slate seems to have discussed it back in February — but I just found out about it, so the horror is still fresh.

Comments

Why should I assume that a company which promises to do unethical stuff for money would be honest about their employees’ qualifications? After all, it’s not as if the clientele can complain.

On another front, this alone guarantees the continued existence of test prep. Even though the SAT will offer the SAT without writing, applicants will likely be required to do some sort of witnessed writing activity.

Also, it’s probably easy for a professor to spot essays like these; any “unemployed professor” who agrees to write this stuff is probably cynical enough to try to squeeze out the maximum amount of money in the minimum amount of time. This means poorly conceived essays with excess verbiage, random quotes, and passages lifted from SparkNotes and elsewhere.

What surprises is not that plagiarism happens on a large scale, or that there are industries behind it, or even that these industries employ “professors,” but rather that students don’t realize how obvious their plagiarism is. They don’t see the disparity between what they might plausibly have written on their own and what this purchased essay contains. (And it isn’t that the latter is better.)

When going over my class rules (both high school and college) I always told students that the thing that made me the maddest about cheaters was how little effort they put into it. Apparently they thought I was so stupid they could get away with anything.